A Quote by Lisa Alther

I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me.

Lisa Alther

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Any Before Collected Fiction Getting Guess Important Me Outside Published Reinforcement Rejection Slips Twelve Wrote Years

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Lisa Alther
American - Novelist
Born: July 23, 1944

It had been fourteen years and I hadn't had anything published. I had 250 rejection slips. I got my first novel published and it was called Kinflicks. It turned out to be a best seller.

Lisa Alther

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

Jerry Spinelli

Most writers, including myself, had to endure a lot of rejections before finally getting published. You could wallpaper a sizeable bathroom with the rejection slips I have received. Don't ever give up!

Jonathan Weeks

I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.

Daniel H. Wilson

I wrote for free for, like, fifteen years; I could redo my parlor in rejection slips. It would be surprisingly tasteful - they use nice paper.

MaryJanice Davidson

I've been trying to write a book since before I was old enough to vote, and I've collected many rejection slips from publishers and magazines. I used to keep them all stuck to my refrigerator, with magnets, but an ex-girlfriend told me they were depressing, and defeatist, and suggested I take them down. A very wise suggestion on her part.

J. R. Moehringer

I don't know what started me, I just wrote poetry from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional.

Sylvia Plath

It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house.

Jerry Spinelli

Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams - what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred - I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then 15 years later, I even started to make real money.

Anne Lamott

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

Fred Saberhagen

All the other kids in ninth grade were drawing hot rods and cocker spaniels and getting blue ribbons in art class. I was getting rejection slips from the 'Saturday Evening Post.'

Brad Holland

There were about ten years of trying, failing, trying again, suffering rejection, etc. My first published book, 'Story of a Girl', was the fourth book I wrote.

Sara Zarr

It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.

Cynthia Kadohata

I wrote three books before I got one published. Most writers do. Have faith, and know that with each work you are getting better.

Jojo Moyes

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I wrote Rick before I was published, and I had no vision of it, really. It was just a story that occurred to me, and that put its little claws in my brain, and I wrote it, and I showed it to a couple people, and they all said, "This is ghastly."

Daniel Handler

A Quote by Lisa Alther

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